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Saturday, June 13, 2009

For want of credibility and a free world of entrepreneurship, am torn to limits and thrown down to pen my thoughts on the much abused vagaries of entrepreneurship (eship). In today’s world of slowdown and downturn it’s a word that has been quite appropriately used inappropriately. Like any other commodity or a consumer durable this word has been gang violated to its extremes and in the current world bleeds of incompetence and money thirsty mongrels.

Recklessness, restlessness and riotousness are not characteristics of a downtown rapscallion. These are evident and inherent qualities that are required of individuals to be able to own the risks involved with anything they do. These are the minds that would ignite, and the sparks that will burn all duplicitous behavior of eship. We need nothing more than passion, aggression and the determination to connect, conceive and create.

Now having disengaged the current prevailing thoughts on entrepreneurship and the need to address its atrocities, I would like to mention that eship is one such vice that cannot be taught.

‘What!! You mean I cant be taught eship?’

‘Sorry buddy, somebody showed you the carrot and put you into an illusion that someday you could wakeup to be an entrepreneur.'

Here is the WHY one cannot be MADE an entrepreneur:

• Old hands who claim to have “been there and done it” cannot translate the essence of eship to the young minds, when they cannot even reach their knees to scratch. All that they have been trying to impose are a set of non-comprehensive ideas about eship and about being an entrepreneur.

• Any institute that claims to teach eship or does promise to make you an entrepreneur overnight (well may be couple of months) is doing nothing, but lying between all conceivable teeth a person can have. Becoming an entrepreneur is not a structured thought process. You can not attend a school to define the way your brain can think, which is ironically what these institutes claim to be doing. (we are not contesting the thought of the Universal schools here)

• Invitations to contests and business incubation houses are methods to identify the good ideas from the bad ones and make money out of the good ones(primarily by taking a stake in a company by funding it early on when its weak)

• Entrepreneurship cells of colleges exists - yes, they just exist. Why? No one knows. Probably some wise being said that it’s an obligatory requirement for an Educational Institution to have an E-cell. Except the elite institutions (needless to name) most E-cells have a dilapidated board, cobwebbed rooms and a slimy creature by name ‘coordinator’ (who might have been an outcast from other appealing student entities of a college)

Encompassing all of the inefficiencies in the making of future entrepreneurs, the biggest one is the belief that eship is all about innovation and invention- A completely illogical and irreverent explanation provided by the so-called stalwarts of the technology space. Fundamentally eship is all about identifying business opportunities, setting up the business and also owning the risks associated with the same. This is something that cannot be taught. It is an instinct, an intuitive ability guided by one’s intelligence that allows one to spot opportunities of business.